On a hill above the Italian village of Ravello stands the Villa Cimbrone, a place of pretense and make-believe at the center of a family with too many secrets, hidden lives, and uncelebrated achievements. The Golden PEN Award–winning biographer of Lytton Strachey and George Bernard Shaw, among many others, Michael Holroyd illuminates a company of women all but lost to history, each playing the role of mistress, fiancée, or muse, but all somehow illegitimate. From Alice Keppel, the mistress of both the second Lord Grimthorpe (owner of the Villa Cimbrone) and the Prince of Wales, to Eve Fairfax, Lord Grimthorpe's abandoned fiancée and the sometime muse of Auguste Rodin—and novelist Violet Trefusis, the scandalous lover of Vita Sackville-West—these women remain on the periphery of the respectable world. Here too at Villa Cimbrone is the elusive biographer Michael Holroyd, who turns the spotlight upon himself as part of his investigations into the art of biography.

"A book of singular fascination—nothing less, in fact, than an attempt to mark out, and then gamely transgress, at least half-a-dozen boundaries that a previous generation of biographers would have hesitated to cross."—Literary Review